SOURCE: "Separating the Chypre from the Ghosts," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXV, No. 5, April 6, 1978, pp. 10-12.

In the following review of Eastward Ha!, Wood recounts Perelman's skill at pun and wordplay and offers many examples of his wit.

"If one laughs at a joke really heartily," Freud remarks rather earnestly in his work on that subject, "one is not in precisely the best mood for investigating its technique." Freud is perfectly right, of course, but his tone should not mislead us. He has obviously been laughing heartily himself at his own most recent example, and I picture him as flinging his pen down, wiping his eyes, and all but falling off his chair. The specimen which seems to have started this thinly disguised unscholarly mirth concerns two East European Jews who meet near the bathhouse. The first one says, "Have you taken a bath...